Product manufacturers and/or retailers often desire to monitor the location of products displayed for sale in a retail environment, and particularly whether certain products are displayed adjacent to other products. Conditions regarding the adjacency of displayed products may even be written into agreements between the product manufacturer and the retailer. There is therefore a need for systems and methods that may be used to monitor the adjacency of stock within a retail environment.
Trade publications forecast widespread use of RFID tags on consumer products to complement the UPC (i.e., ePC) in a 5-15 year timeframe. However, such system is subject to the future development of a very inexpensive tag, cheaper and more effective readers, and full deployment of shelf-based antenna systems in retail outlets. Thus, sophisticated, inexpensive systems predicated on such use of the ePC (passive RFID tags applied to individual product items) are years away from being implemented.
Further, temporary displays are often discarded after only a few days or weeks, which means that stock-status detection equipment either would need to be disposable or very portable and easily redeployed by non-technical in-store personnel. When implemented, such systems may not cover certain types of product or packaging due to their challenging RF properties.
In applicant's commonly assigned and published application, US Pub. No. 2004/0056091, incorporated herein in its entirety, there is disclosed RF tags of various types (e.g., passive, semi-passive, active, and the like), Backscatter Reader Transmitters (BRT), and hubs. Typically, each BRT is a fully self-contained, battery operated unit, and utilizes three antennas. Two medium gain patch antennas are used to read the tags, and a whip antenna is used to report the received data over a wireless link to the hub. Active transmitter tags can have contacts or other sensors that allow them to function like “readers” by collecting data proximal to them and reporting directly to the hub. It would be advantageous to modify such system for detecting and monitoring the location and adjacency of stock in a retail environment.